In Grid Shift, your job is to keep your company's database clean and neatly organized. However, someone tampered with it, and the data has been erased! Using the hints on the sides of the database, fill the database with the correct data in each spot and restore it! Go, underpaid intern!

Grid Shift is a PICO-8 version of a pretty popular logic puzzle named Towers, also known as Skyscrapers. This digital version of that puzzle includes randomly generated puzzles, customizable board sizes (1x1 to 6x6), a hint system to help newcomers to Towers and graphics that aren't simply numbers, they're numbers on towers. With color!

Features

• Endless randomly generated puzzles
• Customizable board size, tackle the literal one click solvable 1x1 boards, the laughably easy 3x3 boards or even the indomitable 6x6 boards!
• Time Attack mode! Solve the puzzle before the time runs out!
• Integrated time and move counter
• Visual cues to help you realize why what you just did was wrong
• Hint system, reveal random tiles of the board!
• Shapes moving on the bottom right of the board (no one knows what they're for)
• UI? Maybe.
• Sound effects?? Perhaps.
• Music!? Nope.

Controls

Arrow keys to move the highlighted tile

X key to increase height / select option in menu

Z key to decrease height / go back

Rules

If you've never played Towers, here are the basics:

This game features an empty board that you need to fill with towers of different heights. This game is similar to Sudoku, in that there can only be one tile of each height on each row and column.

To fill the heights, you need to use the hints at the sides; these hints tell you how many towers are "visible" when looking at the board from that side. Higher towers cover smaller ones.

For example, the row "2 5 4 1 3   X", when looked at from the X, would show a total of 3 towers.

The game has some visual cues to let you know what's happening:

• A black tile indicates that the tile is repeated in its row or column. Only 1 tile of each height can be on each row or column.
• A grey hint indicates that it has been solved. A row or column with both hints grey is considered solved (although, it might not be correct anyways!).
• A red hint indicates that the row is full, but it has not been solved.

On the main screen, you can set the board size. Default size is 5x5 tiles, but you can make it 3x3, 4x4 or 6x6 tiles as well, if you'd like. 3x3 is incredibly easy, while 6x6 might be too complicated, or straight up impossible...

You can also enable Time Attack mode, where the objective is to solve the puzzle before time runs out, and modify some options.

• Board size: Set the board size. Supports 1x1 to 6x6, but 1x1 and 2x2 are not even puzzles... The size is 5x5 by default.
• Board color: The color of the board is random by default, but you can also customize it, if you want to.
• Enable hints: When enabled, allows you to get a hint by holding Z and X at the same time. When used, a hint will reveal a random tower from the board. There is no limit to how many hints you can use and it in no way affects anything, so use as many as you like! :)
• Move board: When enabled, makes the whole board move slightly when increasing/decreasing tower height. You can disable this if it makes you feel dizzy.

Credits

Grid Shift has been in "unfinished project" purgatory for over two years now, and I felt pretty bad for it, so I finally polished it up and uploaded it.

And no, you haven't seen this before. Totally and completely new. Definitely wasn't uploaded last year with a different name. Memory Leak? What's that?

Special thanks to zep.p8 (Lexaloffle) for making PICO-8, and Lazy Devs Academy for their amazing PICO-8 tutorials!

Also, if you are a fan of logic puzzles like me, you will love Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection! It in fact was a big inspiration for this project!

Some fonts used in this project:

• Mizu Font Alphabet by sk89q